I have just released my personal website which you can find at https://michaelandersen.net.

It’s a quick build and a work in progress, but it’s to get my name out there and to start promoting digital sustainability.

CSS has a built-in feature called “prefers-color-scheme” that detects if a user prefers dark or light mode based on their system settings. No cookies. No JavaScript. No local storage. Just CSS doing what it does best.

#CSS #WebDev #DarkMode

Dark mode can save between 39% and 47% of battery power on OLED displays. Over a billion smartphones worldwide use OLED. That’s a lot of energy we can help people save by simply starting with a dark-mode first approach.

Do you design dark mode first or light mode first?

#DarkMode #UXDesign #SustainableWebDesign

Instead of naming your blog post “The best sustainable web hosting services in 2022”, just call it “The best sustainable web hosting services.” Removing the year makes it easy to update the content as time passes. Small naming decisions like this can keep your content alive and relevant for years.

#ContentStrategy #Blogging #SEO

The other day I finally published my personal website at https://michaelandersen.net. I have been wanting to do that for a while because people have been asking for more information about me, my books and my background in tech.

There wasn’t much information before except what I do at Sustainable WWW, but now there is. I will update it over time, and I warn everyone that this is a work in progress.

90% of all data ever produced is never accessed again. We save simply because we can. But all that data sits on servers that run 24/7, consuming energy. Being critical about the content we create and removing what’s no longer needed is one of the simplest things we can do for the internet.

#DataMinimalism #SustainableWeb #DigitalSustainability

I once tested downloading 10 megabytes on a 3G connection. It could take up to 15 minutes. The same 10 megabytes on fiber took 0.5 seconds. Would you wait 15 minutes for a website to load? Most people wouldn’t even wait 2 seconds.

#WebPerformance #SustainableWebDesign

About 46% of global mobile users connect to the internet using 2G or 3G. That’s nearly half of all mobile users. When we optimize our websites, we’re not just helping the environment. We’re making the internet accessible to people who otherwise can’t use it.

Has this changed the way you think about page weight?

#Accessibility #WebPerformance #DigitalInclusion

Green web hosting doesn’t have to cost more than regular hosting. When I was researching for my book, I found green hosting at $2.95/month while a non-green alternative cost $6.00/month for the same service. The greener option was literally cheaper. Sometimes we assume sustainable equals expensive, and it’s just not true.

#GreenHosting #WebHosting #Sustainability

Here’s something that still surprises people: you can write approximately 150,000 words of raw text before it takes up the same space as a single image. So the old saying “a picture says more than 1,000 words” doesn’t really apply to web development.

#WebDev #SustainableWebDesign #Optimization